Socio-psychological aspects of the virtual life organization

Virtual life can be within large virtual communities or special projects like Second Life or Model cities in Japan, as well as in blogs and individual pages in Internet. A fairly comprehensive idea of the virtual life concept can be presented by the Second Life project - a three-dimensional virtual world with the elements of social network that now has over one million of active users. The project was developed and launched by LindenLab, USA in 2003 and afterwards has gained a wide popularity. The past decade was marked by widespread designs of online virtual identities in Internet. This phenomenon was described as applied to such types of electronic communications as multiplayer roleplaying games, teleconferencing, discussion forums, guest books, personal homepages, etc. It should be noted that virtual individuals basically differ psychologically from residents of large virtual communities. While the latter are focused primarily on recreation, entertainment, pursuit of new knowledge, the former prefer to use the possibilities of virtual life to achieve real practical results.